Help:Style Guide and Policies
The purpose of this document is to help maintain cohesive styling and article organization across this wiki project, the ZNG Wiki. ZNG Wiki Style Guide (Draft!) Using Titles of Creative Works For the titles of creative works such as movies, video games, or books, italicize the title. For example: *''Star Wars: The Force Awakens'' *''The Lord of the Rings'' *''Breath of the Wild'' Even if it is a series name, like Star Wars, or Super Smash Bros., please italicize it, it makes the titles look good and stand out, as well as keeping the wiki consistent. The one exception to this is "Zelda," when used to refer to the Zelda series. You can just write it out with no italicizations, because of its frequency as an adjective and just general high use of the term to refer to The Legend of Zelda series. For games in the Zelda series or other series that have already been referred to at least once in the article, you may refer to them by only their subtitle. For example, for its first appearance in an article, write The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but from there on in the article, you can simply refer to it as Skyrim. Level of Formality for Writing As for formality, this is not a wiki project that will be turned in to a teacher or submitted to be published in a journal. It is a project to help organize the thoughts and experiences of some random folks who met over Miiverse. Therefore, there isn't any need to avoid contractions, common acronyms, emoji, or colloquial language. Naturally, you should still try to write clearly and without glaring flaws (e.g., use correct capitalization and spelling). But overall, the level of formality is not too high. Spelling Out Numbers Don't spell out numbers when they are in tables, lists or another compact format: this reduces the ease of looking across rows or columns to compare number values, as well as making the numbers take up more space. When in the body of an article, it is acceptable either to spell out the numbers or not to spell them out; try to be natural rather than forcing yourself to follow a rule. Small numbers are often more natural when spelled (e.g, "one time" rather than "1 time", "the two of them" rather than "the 2 of them"). On the other hand, spelling out long numbers (e.g., "five hundred and thirty seven") is usually slower to read than simply writing the numerical version ("537"), and as such should probably be avoided. Article Titles Title case should be used. Even though this does not allow distinction between proper nouns and common nouns in the article titles (and in section headings), the existing articles are following this style, so future articles should as well. If you aren't familiar with all of the rules of title case, please look them up to find out more. Wikipedia's article on title case > Linking Remember to link articles where relevant across the wiki so as to make browsing as seamless as possible. However, don't link to any other particular article more than once per article. Links should be from a word to a few words in length, only including those words which, standing alone, would be needed to identify the page. Don't link to pages with "click here" or entire sentences. Also, linking to common articles, like the "Zelda" series article, the "Miiverse" article, or the "ZNG (Organization)" article is usually unnecessary. Only link to those articles if they are centrally connected to the topic of the article at hand, rather than every time the ZNG, Miiverse, or Zelda is mentioned. Avoid excessive use of external links in the article's body text. Include as many of these as you like, however, in an "External Links" section at the bottom of the page. Date Format When writing dates in the body of articles, use the full US format (e.g., March 8, 2017). When the dates are in a space-limited area, such as in a table, please use the M/D/YY format. If the month or day is one digit, do not apply a preceding zero, simply write the numbers that are needed (e.g., 3/8/17). ZNG Wiki Policies (Draft!) Article Content The articles are intended to be somewhat encyclopedic. By which, they aren't quite intended to be little "user pages" for each person to customize (please use the feature for this, or your Wikia/Fandom account page). A goal is to have consistency across the articles in a category (as much as possible with the infomation available, of course), so if you add a feature to one of the "ZNG Members" pages, for instance, try to add it to other "ZNG Members" pages as well, even if it is empty for them to fill out. Try to not refer to the process of the wiki and editing in the articles excessively. For example: stating the author of the page, because anyone could edit, so there are not really "authors" of any one particular page. Also, while leaving empty sections encouraging others to help fill them in is fine, they should be made use of minimally. Discussion of whether content should appear on the pages, agreement with the pages, or congratulations to someone for having made a good edit can take place on the talk pages, user message walls, or other non-article spaces. Don't be afraid to write slightly satirical content, as long as it's clear that you're joking. Of course, bullying or insulting other people by being "funny" at their expense is not okay; be considerate. Privacy of all the people written about on the wiki is also important. If the information is on a Miiverse post, it's generally fine, since those are all publicly accessible. But, be cautious with relaying anything said that has been implied rather than directly stated. We do not want to misrepresent people here on the wiki. Types of Articles Try to keep the two kinds of article separate: lists and info pages. Information pages (info pages) consist of paragraphs of text, with a summarizing and encyclopedic format. Lists, on the other hand, primarily organize information, whether it is of playthrough logs, screenshots, and the like. Info articles can certainly link to lists, and vice versa. Also, a list may have a brief description at the top of the page of the scope of the list. Essentially, keep away from having both a list and analysis/summary on the same article, and instead, split the topic into separate pages from each. There is also another division between types of articles. Category:ZNG Fictitious Universe is for articles on descriptions of little ZNG imaginary or role-playing events, locations or things such as that, while all the other articles are for covering actual events which happened or things which seriously existed. Reliability and Notability Sites like Wikipedia expect you to have citations for nearly everything and to only include information on the articles that is relevant to their encyclopedic vision. Clearly, The ZNG Wiki is nowhere near as formal. While maintaining solid article quality is an aim, there can be a variety of information: humorous interpretations, factual reports, concise summaries, long lists, etc. If you are trying to make a very factual, serious observation about the ZNG, citations are a good way to supplement the factuality of your arguments. After all, you might forget something about how an event happened exactly, so why not look it up and include the link in that case? The List of Logs Made by ZNG Members and List of ZNG Chat Posts are useful places to find links to many ZNG haunts, or you can use Miiverse directly. Stylistically, the and tags should be used to enclose a citation, followed with a tag at the very bottom of the page (unless there is a nav, in which case it should be placed directly above the nav). Edit Summaries Leave a note explaining what you changed. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some possible sentence frames for an edit summary: *Added ___ *Updated ___ *Moved ___ to ___ page *Made ___ into its own article *Gr/sp (Grammar/spelling) *Minor rewording *Reformatted ___ by ___ The minor edit checkbox can be used for if you are fixing a small grammar/spelling issue, or a small formatting issue, correcting mistyped links, or the like. The ZNG Wiki Discussions For the rules on the site's discussions area, see its Discussion Guidelines page.